Psychomotor Development: Factors and Functional Units
Functional Unit 1
All mental activity requires a minimum condition of alertness and vigilance, cortical tonus, and selective attention. Structures with a two-way relationship with the cortex and the limbic system are involved in emotional regulation.
Psychomotor Factors
Hierarchical organization: functions pertaining to the three basic functional units of the brain. Factors and functions translate complex activities adaptable to specific contributions in all functional, corresponding mental activity expressed in the psychomotor system. Distributed functional units in the three self-regulated, dependent dynamic circuits. The functional hierarchy present in the child’s development is a constellation. Meeting psychomotor function, each organization contributes to the overall system.
Psychomotor Factor 1: Tonus
Neurophysiological percentage, according to Luria, relates to the role of early warning and monitoring required for any mental activity.
Note Psychomotor: body component, active tension of muscle structure, and guidance that prepares basic psychomotor permanent state of slight contraction in which muscles are striated. Backdrop to motor and postural activities. Exaggerated contraction (paratonia, catatonia) to a decontraction at rest (hypotonia) where it goes virtually unnoticed, although it exists, muscle tension (Coste, 1980). Wallon (1942) emphasized the importance of tone in the activity and development of the individual. Tone appears in connection with attitudes, postures, and gestures that are used in the field of organic humana. Expression of the relationship and mental retardation or stimulation that will determine the behavior of individual evolution. The quality of movement is closely linked to the base tone, i.e., neurological data and nerve maturation. The tonic function, acting on all the muscles of the body, constantly regulates their different attitudes and thus constitutes the basis of emotion. Tone is, therefore, the basis on which attitudes, postures, and gestures are formed. These sources of raw emotions and reactions postural tone prepare mental representation.
Ajuriaguerra described the tonic dialogue (1986) as a body of information exchange that occurs between the mother and the newborn child and is expressed mainly by states of tension-strains that reflect feelings of pleasure-displeasure and acogidarechazo, causing reactions in the other.
Importance of the tonic function: body postural schema, emotion, attention, and perception boot are the foundation of psychomotor structuring.
Psychomotor Factor 2: Balance
Determinant of voluntary movement construction and postural adjustment. Indispensable gravitational condition for all intentional movement. The cerebellum, vestibular nucleus, mesencephalic nucleus of motor organization, and proprioceptive postural balance are based on proprioceptivity (deep sensitivity), vestibular function, and vision.
Posture and balance: postural system, a set of anatomical structures that are directed to the maintenance of bodily relations with one’s body and space, in order to obtain positions that allow a defined activity or are useful, or enable learning.
Potentiality of the body (Quirós and Schrager, 1987): Exclusion of the body from the plane of consciousness as a result of automating the rebalancing process and maintenance of posture. The postural system enables the integration of learning to liberate the cerebral cortex from the responsibility for maintaining the position for lower levels of regulation by automated processes. Attention and consciousness are available to start or develop new learning processes.
Psychomotor Factors of the Second Functional Unit: Laterality
Specialization of cerebral hemispheres. According to Luria, the left hemisphere assumes a role in higher mental processes. In right-handed individuals, it becomes an instrument for basic spatial thinking and visual-perceptual orientation. The identification of selective predominance of one side of the body reflects the quality of sensory integration and intra-body awareness. Intra-hemispheric functional asymmetry is a conquest over ontogenetic development. Bilateral integration of the body: unilateral praxis and language. It is consistent as a final product of the organization and central processing of sensory motor skills. Feelings are processed before symbols. Organizational problems, afferent and efferent influences on learning. Laterality is innate due to genetic factors, although training and social stress factors can influence it (Zangwill, 1975).
The two hemispheres cooperate in ontogenesis but functionally specialize progressively: one in symbolic content, the other in non-symbolic content. Handedness emerges at the end of the first year but is physically located around 4-5 years, after a prior period of ambilateralidad. Culturally, there is more emphasis on the right direction: right hand is synonymous with supremacy and preservation, detailed and noble tasks. Zurda in Spanish means not being smart. Dax and Broca (1861) discovered the relationship between language and cerebral dominance. Bilateral integration of the body depends on vestibular and proprioceptive integration inherent in experience and postural tone, which will promote more differentiated crustal levels: somatognosia and structuring of space and time.
According to Ayres (1971), bilateral integration dysfunction can compromise manual predominance, causing dysfunctional signals below or inter-hemispheric, impacting psychomotor development and cognitive potential. Lateral balance allows access to symbolic information, usually by the left hemisphere. In language acquisition, the brain must organize itself to work first with tonic information, tactile, and kinesthetic information.
Parietal lobe: notion of the body, global integration, and vestibular sensory information (proprioceptivity). Integration of global movements in association with space and the formation of body image (somatognosia). Somatotopic projections of information within the body: receiving, analyzing, and storing information of the body, making consciousness somatotopically structured and stored. Prior psychomotor factors converge, forming a multifactorial construction involving the relationship with the other and the dimension of language. It results from the organization and structure of simple perceptions into more complex constellations, giving uniqueness and subjectivity. Psychological construct (Fisher and Cleveland, 1968). It receives other names: postural schema, body image, self-image, image of self-body. Psychomotor observation: results of the organization of sensory input in a structured and internalized image from which emerges a mental representation that constitutes a domestic framework. Role in motor coordination and more differentiated development: learning. It reveals the human capacity to recognize oneself as an object in one’s own perceptual field, where self-confidence and self-esteem reside. Given its relationship with self-visual information, the organization is involved in visuospatial and visuo-perceptual functions, risking cognitive functions, identification, categorization, integration of self, self-esteem, and self-vulnerability.
Behavioral repercussions: distractibility, impulsivity, poor spatial and temporal orientation, hyperactivity, excessive anxiety, weak sequencing of activities, and language. It compromises symbolic learning areas.
Structuring Space-Time
Primary, secondary, and tertiary visual and auditory analyzers (occipital and temporal lobes). Receiving, processing, and storage space require a visual-perceptual structure, which contains visual areas of the occipital cortex. Receiving, processing, and storage of rhythm depend on the integration of nuclear areas from the auditory cortex. In the intra-spatial dimension, the child is developing ontogenetically an extra dimension and inter-space: more complex space systems. The child locates himself before localizing in space or locating objects in space. It depends on the notion of body laterality, and the notion of space is constructed through the interpretation of sensory data, which have no direct relationship with space. The child learns to interpret sensory information in terms of space, and spatial concepts are constructed in terms of sensory and motor information. Vestibular, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive information in terms of spatial location. A stable internalized notion of the body plays a role in the achievement of complex mental functions, such as establishing relationships, similarities, and differences, working with concepts, and selective attention. Space in children involves the appropriation of language and visual perception: eye-hand coordination, figure-ground, and constancy of form are inseparable from semantic and syntactic elements, such as the properties of objects. Body locomotion, perception, and representation.
Temporal notion: A sequence of events and their temporal relationship are essential to establish the relations system. The child is aware of his actions, his past, present, and future experiences, and anticipates. Notion of organization, control, and cognitive activity level. The extension unit is rhythm, which involves awareness of equal time intervals. Rhythm is present at the individual biological level, in the physical world, but also a requirement in human behavior:
- Motor: movement coordination
- Hearing: recognition of stimuli
- Vision: systematic exploration of space
- School learning: reading, writing, discrimination, and phonetic calculation
Locomotion body Perception Representation